ADVANTAGE: AWESOME

Saturday, June 30, 2007

In Defense of Hank Pym

I was going to post about the books that came this week, especially the amazingly mindblowing Green Lantern Sinestro Corps Special Prologue-whew!-but something's been on my mind since last night while posing my brother's Marvel Legends. Yes, I have my own, but I loan out my services.

Anyway, it just gets to me how Hank Pym is portrayed now. When I was growing up, Hank was a jumpsuit wearing adventure scientist, with miniaturized weapons, devices and Quinjets in his pockets and the ability to release his Pym particles to shrink and grow things. I knew from back issues that he had something like eighteen other identities, most of which other people had commandeered throughout the years. He and the Wasp were this couple who would go back and forth between Avengers and West Coast Avengers, and they were in love, but had some bad history. I know now what that bad history is, but for nearly twenty years, Hank and Janet have been a loving couple, working and living with each other.

And now, well, he's just the guy who beat his wife. It's pretty much mentioned in every comic he appears in now.

I realize Marvel cherishes it's edgy, controversial storylines but if that story happened twenty years ago, and the characters involved spent the majority of that interlude between then and now happy in each other's arms, why dredge it up? I kind of blame Geoff Johns for this. When he was writing Avengers for that six months, he had an issue with Hank and Janet in Vegas, and Hank reproposes to Janet, wanting a second shot at married bliss. Yet, even with the weird sexcapades at the beginning, Janet declines, saying she hasn't yet forgiven him completely. Which would make sense-

If she hadn't been living with him for YEARS!

I can only hope that after all the World War Hulks and Initiatives and whatever next crossover darkens Marvel's day, Hank and Jan can finally be brought back together, without this forced strain and Hank's newly developed ineptitude. I'm not going to get into the theories and such of domestic violence and anger management, but Kurt Busiek retconned it so that Hank's breakdown came from knowing Ultron's brain patterns were Hank's own, causing him to question his own sanity and nature if Ultron could be that evil with his mindset. Jan forgave him and it shouldn't be brought up constantly as Hank's only quality.

3 comments:

Yeah. West Coast Avengers was uncool in the coolest possible way. I've loved that stuff. And you're right about Hank. It's been blown out of proportion totally, which isn't a way to treat one of the characters that ushered in the "Marvel Age" no matter how less popular he was compared to the others.